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2015/01/25

Synchronicities are important for John Higgs. In 2000 TC
(2014), his book about the band TC Lethbridge, he tells us that the value of "following the synchronicities" (p.49) was one of the many lessons he learnt
from Brian Barrit. Barrit was a psychedelic pioneer and author of The Road
of Excess (1998). He collaborated with Timothy Leary and is one of the many
personalities who move through Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger
(1977). Barrit was also a friend of and mentor to the band. As they – Flinton
Chalk, Doggen and Kev Bales – improvised in Avebury throughout 1994 Barritt
appeared fresh from his absorption in Krautrock and rave and encouraged them to
take their music "to Jupiter" (p. 57). 'Appeared' is very much the operative word
as according to Bales, he was first introduced to Barritt just as he was reading
Cosmic Trigger: "Hi Kev, I’m Brian, I’m in that book, you’ll find me on
page 111" (p.56).

2000 TC is full of these weird intersections. It's
the story of the band, the story of their album 2000 TC as well as the
story of their seemingly endless movement through a sequence of personal,
professional and symbolic synchronicities. It starts with the spreading of
Leary's ashes in 2006, recounts Chalk's geomantic experiences with Julian Cope
in 1992 and charts the development of the group into a series of interconnected
musical projects: Brain Donor, The Sons of TC Lethbridge and Spiritualized. The
narrative pauses for Barritt’s passing in 2011 and ends with the imminent
revival of Robert Anton Wilson by way of Ken Campbell's daughter Daisy Eris,
the Cosmic Trigger Festival of November 2014 and the return/arrival of TC Lethbridge as part of
that event. Whereas Higgs used synchronicity (particularly in the Jungian
sense) as a tool to narrate the events of his previous book, The KLF: Chaos,Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Quid (2012) in 2000 TC
synchronicity is an essential part of the narrative under discussion. In order
to understand the full significance of TC Lethbridge appearing at the festival,
it's necessary to meditate upon the various connections that constitute the
band’s secret career.

It's for this reason that towards the end of the book Higgs
tells us the date. He says that he is writing the end of the manuscript on
Monday 13th October 2014, six weeks ahead of the live debut of a
band who formed 20 years before. The book is thus revealed as a pre-emptive
history of an extensive pre-history that is yet to be public knowledge. Rather
than memorializing the band in the wake of a 'legendary' gig, Higgs lays out
their narrative so as to prime the approaching concert as something of a
charged birth.

Reading the book I was much taken with this covert approach.
It seemed that for all Higgs' expressed awkwardness in writing the biography of
a band "that no-one has heard of" (p. 108), the unheralded nature of the
project was something of a magical act appropriate to the life of the group: a
personal act of dedication. Certainly the extremely limited print run of the
book (111 copies: no doubt a wink to Barritt's appearance in Wilson) reflects this. Whilst the story
recounted connects elements of failure and frustration with the obscurity of TC
Lethbridge, what emerges is also the cultish aura of an intentional retreat
from view. One gets the sense that - consciously or not - the band chose to be
invisible. As such it's unsurprising that the most extensive outline of their
history is essentially a privately circulated document. As a comparison, Bill
Drummond and Mark Manning’s Bible of Dreams (1992?) comes most readily to mind.[1]

On a more personal note, the specificity of the book’s completion
date sparked off a series of my own synchronicities. 13th October is my birthday and on Monday 13th October 2014, I received
and spent the day reading Higgs' The KLF. The year before I had marked
October 13th 2013 by listening to A Giant (2003) by The Sons of T.C. Lethbridge. A much earlier October 13th involved an odd
experience trying to buy Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
(1997) by Spiritualized. I had ordered the album in a high street record store
with the intention of collecting it on the 13th. I placed the order on
the phone but on the day turned up and asked for it at the wrong shop. Here I
found that the store did indeed have a copy of Ladies and Gentlemen but
it had been ordered and held for someone else. I thought that was the end of it
but the guy at the counter then offered to give me the single copy for free on
the basis of some arcane record dealer logic I still can't fathom. He said I
should have it for nothing because it was over a year since he had first
ordered it in for a guy who never turned up to buy it. Apparently the album
arrived at his shop on October 13th 1998 and remained unclaimed,
unrequested and unsold until I arrived and asked for it that day, October 13th
1999. Maybe the other guy bought 'my' copy at the other shop a year earlier. Or
something.

The link between TC Lethbridge and Spiritualized is that the
latter currently contains two thirds of the former (Doggen and Bales). They
joined in 1999 whilst they were still working with Cope in Brain Donor and The
Sons of TC Lethbridge. I had gone to see Spiritualized in 2008 in celebration
of another personal milestone. Anyone who saw the band on that tour will
probably agree that Jason Pierce was mining the most riff-heavy sections of his
back catalogue. Sonically it was Spiritualized via Spacemen 3andBrain Donorand TC Lethbridge. I knew the history of the line-up but I hadn't
expected these multiple identities, as it were, to be so evident during the
show. Of course, Higgs informs us that it was during the 2008 tour that Doggen
re-established his friendship with Chalk and began the long journey towards
finally releasing 2000 TC and performing live. They had drifted apart
due to their differing creative relationships with Cope in the aftermath of
their time in Avebury. However, by 2008 Doggen and Bales were both severing
their relationship with 'The Drude' (for good reason: read the book). Point is,
the 2008 Spiritualized gigs were very much instances of personal, musical and
symbolic transition for all involved. No wonder that it seemed as if three or
four different bands were galloping through the songs.[2]

So what? Who cares if I got a book for my birthday and
happen to like the same bands that Higgs writes about? A lot of things happened
on October 13th and have happened on October 13th just as
they have done and will do on every other day of the year. This of course is
true, but the point of a synchronicity is precisely that there is no definite
connection between the ideas, events or actions that are brought together. When
Jung speaks about the structure of a synchronicity he does not talk in terms of
cause and effect but in terms of an "acausal connecting principle". The
significance of a synchroncity is not the actual connection between ideas or
events, but the psychic connectivity. When thinking through a synchronicity the
question should not be one of rationalization, ('is there an actual connection?')
but active speculation, (how and why have these
things been connected in this way?)
J.G. Ballard put this another way when he denied the possibility of
coincidence. There are no coincidences, he said, but instead "deep assignments
run through all of our lives". In making these connections between my own
reading and record buying I’m not intending to impose upon them a gravitas they
clearly do not deserve. However, I am interested in how their recall in the
light of reading Higgs might foreground something of a 'deep
assignment'.

Everybody endlessly mythologizes the detail of their
day-to-day existence. It is purely and simply an existential defense mechanism
that helps stave off knowledge of the encroaching void. Looking for points of
intersection helps to plot out a narrative and it is this sense of trajectory
that constitutes 'purpose'. On this level, the synchrony I felt with The KLF
and 2000 TC ultimately helped neutralise
a sense of purposelessness.

When reading about Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty on October
13th 2014, I was struck by the description of the formation of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Higgs tells us that Drummond was visiting his
parents on New Year’s Day 1987, having "left the music industry" the previous
summer "at the symbolic age of thirty-three and a third". Drummond goes out for
walk and upon his return telephones Cauty to announce the start of their "hip-hop
group". It’s not clear what precisely happened to Drummond during his walk. He
was obviously dissatisfied with solo projects like The Man (1986) and ready to work in the kind of register that Cauty's
skills with music technology could facilitate.[3]
That said, despite the extension and complexity of that which they go onto do
as The JAMs and The KLF, the biographical detail of Drummond’s phone call
indicates that they are essentially a response to his arrival at a particularly "totemic age" (p. 93).

For reasons that should be obvious, I was reading this
whilst being uncomfortably aware of my proximity to a comparable totemism. I
say "uncomfortable" because I felt that having reached a similar age, I was
neither where I wanted to be, nor had I done what I had intended to do. Also,
unlike Drummond's instigation of a "revolution in [his] life", I felt that my
own opportunities for making such a seismic change had passed. Three months
later on January 15th 2015, I read 2000 TC, having been kindly
supplied with a copy by Mark Sampson at Iron Man Records.[4]
To learn that Higgs was completing his book just as my black cloud was starting
to descend was really quite startling.

2000TC is
essentially the inverse narrative of The
KLF. Both stories are connected on the basis of a shared sense of ritual. However
that of The KLF is built upon the
initial achievement of success. Whatever was signified by that fire in the boathouse at Jura required Drummond and Cauty to have
accumulated a million pounds in the first place. By contrast, just as the
flames began on 23rd August 1994, TC Lethbridge were coming to the
end of their time in Avebury and about to begin their extended hiatus. According
to The KLF, Drummond and Cauty then
spent much of their subsequent careers "haunted" by the act and engaged in an
attempt to understand it (p.11). According to Higgs, much of Chalk’s involvement with
TC Lethbridge was an attempt to creatively process his mystical experiences
with Cope in 1992. On this basis, one could say that it failed, and failed just
as Drummond and Cauty were beginning to think through their experience. Whereas
The Modern Antiquarian (1998) established
Cope as one of the contemporary mediators of Lethbridge-type speculation, Chalk's
musical project lacked the same exposure, and thus the sense of 'closure' that
one might hope to build into any ritualistic act.[5]

That said, I came away from 2000 TC having felt it was a response to The KLF insofar as it privileged the persistence of vision and the importance of personal insight, in
excess of the monetized pre-requisite that underpins Drummond and Cauty’s potlatch.
Aside from being a great book about male friendship (and the difficulties of
creative ego), it also suggests that some projects work in relation to their
own specific temporalities rather than the convenience of a given schedule. If it’s
not working, it might not be you that’s at fault; it might just not be time for
it to work. By that I don’t mean to
invoke the language of unfounded self-help, but to point to a different model of
success and realization than is currently prioritized in contemporary, (i.e. hyper-accelerated,
massively compacted) understandings of achievement. Similarly, in 2000 TC, moreso than in The KLF, Higgs valorises a processional,
non-reciprocal sense of success, insofar as an act of personal significance can
be perceived as such without the necessity of external validation. Of course,
not everyone has the luxury of two decades to devote to a single project, not
least one that tries to understand a mind-bending encounter with glowing standing
stones.[6]
But I took the extractable point as being one that celebrates not the privilege
of the 'artistic' psyche but the efficacy of the mind's basic software: the
associative, generative and synchronistic faculties of thought, memory and
analysis. If you want 'direction' (I'm now saying to myself, having taken the
other post-it notes off the mirror) in excess of that which forms the necessary
trajectory, there's no need to look ahead, to defer it ahead or to lament its
impossibility. Instead, look back into the wake and zero-in on the points of
consistency. You've been there before and you'll go there again. There's a line
in amongst all that flotsam. Find it.

[2] Compare
this to the gigs Spiritualized did with the same line-up in support of the
album Sweet Heart / Sweet Light (2012).
Good but not great. Muted would be the word. Significantly less fire. Maybe
Pierce did manage to get Doggen to hold-off on the rock riffs.

[3] Cauty
was also the guitarist in Brilliant, the unsuccessful band that Drummond had
managed.

[4] The
envelope carried a postmark of 12th January. I received the book on
the 14th. Looking at this from a purely speculative and mythopoetic
view, I could regard the fact that the book spent the 13th of
January in transit as somewhat significant. The claims of various mail-artists
regarding the 'energy' accumulated by the art object as it physically travels through
the postal network spring to mind. I was half expecting to see a Trystero printed
on the envelope.

[5] This
forms a key point of the magical discussion in 2000 TC. There’s a particularly good quote from Richard Stanley on
page 22. Chalk's involvement with The Modern Antiquarian project is also a key theme of the book and underlies his Avebury experiences.

[6] Neither
does Flinton Chalk by the sounds of it. 2000TC deals with musicians of limited financial means. The importance of
pursuing an idea, despite the glacial pace imposed by other, more pressing
requirements seems to be the main point.

About Me

Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology

Collection of essays edited by Jack Hunter features my essay on William Burroughs, magick and recording technology. Available now.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Annotated screenplay text with archival dossier, unpublished writings and a series of new essays. Nohzone Archive.

Framework 52: Things Fall Apart.

2 volume set of texts, documents, extracts, photographs and essays covering the life and work of Peter Whitehead. Available now from Wayne State University Press.

Selections from the Nohzone Archive.

Collection of rare photographs and previously unpublished documents covering the production of Peter Whitehead's films between 1965 and 1969. Part of the digital resource collection 'Rock n Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest'. Available now from Adam Matthew Digital.

Crash Cinema: Representation in Film

Collection of essays edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good and Will Godfrey featuring my essay on Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). Available now from Cambridge Scholar's Press.

Telegraph for Garlic

Collection of essays on Bram Stoker's Dracula edited by Samia Ounoughi that features my essay on Dracula and phonography. Available now from Red Rattle Books.